Photo: (L-R) Creative Designer Nina Letterly, Editor Doug Marrin, TRUiC CEO Nagabhushanam “Bobbi” Peddi, STN Publisher/TRUiC COO Ashley Hiser, and Director of Business Development Ashley Damm. Photo by Priscilla Creswell.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, newspapers were the primary source of news for the average American—in fact, in the nineteenth century, Chelsea alone boasted three newspapers of its own. Then, technology revolutionized news gathering and news reporting. Since 2005, the U.S. has lost a quarter of its newspapers, amounting to two newspaper closings every week.
But the Sun Times News will not be among them, thanks to new friends, new ideas, and new technology.
This summer, the Sun Times News was purchased by TRUiC, The Really Useful Information Company, headquartered in Ann Arbor. Founder and CEO Nagabhushanam “Bobby” Peddi describes TRUiC as “a media-tech and information company providing free guides for entrepreneurs.”
Early this year, Peddi met Sun Times owner Chuck Colby and learned about the paper’s goals and mission. Peddi offered to help improve the paper’s website free of charge. Gradually, he began considering acquiring a small percentage of the business. But when increased mailing and paper costs began swamping the Sun Times operating budget, Peddi jumped in to keep the paper in print, agreeing to buy a controlling interest.
“The Sun Times and I are both in the business of information,” he says. “TRUiC had the technological infrastructure the paper lacked, and the paper has the community we lacked. But we agreed that there would be a firewall between the business side and the editorial side. I stick to the business side. My job is to keep the bills paid.”
Besides offering financial stability, Peddi also offered the services of his chief operating officer, Ashley Hiser, and graphic designer Nina Letterly, whose administrative expertise and design savvy immediately began making a visible difference. Page layouts changed. So did traffic to the redesigned website: it immediately rose 24-fold.
Peddi plans to incorporate revolutionary additions to local news delivery, including weather alerts, reports on cheap flights and local farmers’ crops, as well as crossword puzzles, games, and much more.
“Some things haven’t changed, however: our goal of providing prompt, accurate news online to residents of our four communities (Dexter, Chelsea, Saline, and Milan), free of charge. Our editions continue to be delivered by mail, with some copies available in local businesses.”
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The Sun Times has had an adventurous journey leading to TRUiC’s door.
Its roots actually lie in the Stockbridge Town Crier, which was founded somewhere around 1882. In 2008, Manchester native Bob Nester bought the paper because he believed “every community deserves a local newspaper that covers high school sports, civic affairs, local organizations’ activities, and matters of concern to the people living there. And every town council needs an official newspaper of record.”
Nester expanded its coverage to focus on Chelsea, Dexter, Saline, and Stockbridge, but its handful of reporters also tried to pay some attention to Pinckney, Unadilla, and the townships of Lyndon and Sylvan, as well as Ingham County’s White Oak and Bunker Hill, so those communities could have a newspaper of record in which to publish legal notices.
But Nester eventually acknowledged that his staff was spread too thin. He condensed the paper’s coverage to three communities: Dexter, Chelsea, and Saline, sending their residents the paper free of charge while retaining a commitment to “publish the facts without prejudice.” Revenues were generated by municipalities’ public notices and local businesses’ advertisements.
By 2015, the Sun Times was delivered by mail weekly, free of charge, to 25,000 households.
And then Covid hit. In the midst of the pandemic, Nester sold some of his real estate properties to keep the Sun Times News staff paid and the paper in business. In July of 2020, he asked Chuck Colby to sell ads for him, and when Colby immediately received commitments from eighteen advertisers, Nester asked him “to run the whole thing.”
Colby moved the newspaper offices into the cavernous second-story room above the PNC Bank in Dexter and expanded coverage to Milan. Weekly mailings totaled 18,000, and advertisers responded well to the changes. But this past summer, finances became critical.
“During and after Covid, the cost of paper and postage nearly doubled,” Colby explains. “In 2020, an edition cost us $6,700 per week. Five years later, it had jumped to $10,000.”
“For each edition, the Sun Times was losing money,” Peddi says. After a three-hour walk and talk with Bob Nester and hours talking to Chuck and editor Doug Marrin, he began considering what he could do for the paper and how it fit with TRUiC’s mission.
After an urgent call to Peddi outlining the paper’s financial strain, TRUiC acted swiftly to keep the presses running without missing a single issue.
As soon as TRUiC took over the paper’s business affairs in August, traffic to the radically revised Sun Times Facebook page rose 24-fold—“and so far, I’ve given only ten percent of the ideas we have to increase traffic and revenue,” Peddi estimates. “You’ll see more content on the web, more games, more informational features, and more staffing.”
Even though Colby has sold a majority of his stock to TRUiC, he retains a minority ownership stake in the paper while pursuing new endeavors.
“I can’t say enough positive things about TRUiC,” adds Marrin. “While the Sun Times continued to grow steadily, sometimes rapidly, since Covid, we outgrew our ability to sustain ourselves administratively. TRUiC has offered us the administrative structure and financial backing we had been lacking. We’re off to a fantastic start together.”
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